Colin Reader is an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 geologist

Geologist

A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth as well as the processes and history that has shaped it. Geologists usually engage in studying geology. Geologists, studying more of an applied science than a theoretical one, must approach Geology using...

 with an interest in Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...

 and is also secretary of The Manchester Ancient Egypt Society.

His studies of the Sphinx

Sphinx

A sphinx is a mythical creature with a lion's body and a human head or a cat head.The sphinx, in Greek tradition, has the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the face of a woman. She is mythicised as treacherous and merciless...

 have contributed to a debate on the outer fringes of archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

 regarding the date of the monument. He suggested on the basis of weathering evidence that the Sphinix is older than its commonly accepted 4th dynastic date and instead it and two other buildings on the Giza Plaeau date to the early dynastic

Early Dynastic Period of Egypt

The Archaic or Early Dynastic Period of Egypt immediately follows the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt c. 3100 BC. It is generally taken to include the First and Second Dynasties, lasting from the Protodynastic Period of Egypt until about 2686 BC, or the beginning of the Old Kingdom...

 or late predynastic period.

Publications include A geomorphological study of the Giza necropolis with implications for the development of the site (Archaeometry 43: 1 (2001) pp149–165)

External links

• Giza Before the Fourth Dynasty by Colin Reader reproduced from the Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum (JACF) 9 (2002), pp. 5–21